Getting excited for redears

[Huntalivesh23]

I just found out yesterday the corps stocked my local lake (10,000 some acres) with over 550,000 redears. They say they're reasoning is to turn the lake into a largemouth fishing lake. I could care less about that lol but I like the ideas of redears and crappie filling my freezer

[killum]

What Lake you talking about? Are there a lot of stunted bass or Bluegill in the lake? lots of shell fish or snails? I ask not to run up and poach some redear but trying to understand the reasoning for introducing Redear to get a better bass population...

[Huntalivesh23]

This is Carlyle lake. I have no idea why they say this is supposed to help the bass because I had thought the bass fishing had been good. A friend of mine called me to check in boats for a tournament he was helping host there and another friend of mine that crappie fishes a lot fished that tournament and he's the one who actually told me this. I just got excited about the redears and didn't even ask why they thought it was supposed to help the bass fishing.

[killum]

Didn't find any mention on the DNR site but like most the Il page is none to well organized or user friendly> anyone know why introducing Redear would help the bass population? Has Carlyle got a huge problem with other species that Redear could help control? I dunno

[CrappiePappy]

Didn't find any mention on the DNR site but like most the Il page is none to well organized or user friendly> anyone know why introducing Redear would help the bass population? Has Carlyle got a huge problem with other species that Redear could help control? I dunno

See if this answers your questions : J.M. Malone and Son, Inc.

IF this lake (Carlyle) has ANY Shad species in it, the sunfish species are not going to be the main forage base for the Bass. Sunfishes (like Bluegill & Redears) know to hide, whereas Shad species are open water fish & tend to ball up for protection (which doesn't always work) .... not to mention that Bass tend to favor the soft finned Shad, over the hard finned sunfish, as they're easier to swallow without potential of injury.

Cedar Creek Lake (Lincoln Co. Ky) was made as a Trophy Bass lake ... stocked with Bass, Channel Catfish, Bluegill, Black Crappie, & Redears. Unfortunately, not all of the resident species of the original Cedar Creek were eradicated. Gizzard Shad, Green Sunfish, Longears, and who knows what else survived the eradication attempt ... and the Bluegill, Crappie, & Redears have taken many more years to develop into their size potential (than was originally planned), simply because of the Shad population being favored as a forage for the Bass. KDFWR even had to take the size limit (9") off the Crappie, and increase the creel from 15 to 30, because they weren't being preyed upon sufficiently to keep them from stunting. Probably worked the same way for the Bluegill & Redears, too.

The lake is now 10yrs old, and while it (now) does produce some good sized Bass, Crappie, Redears, & Channel Cats .... it should have been doing so since about 2006 (if the eradication project had succeeded in removing the "unwanted" resident species) !!

... cp

[Huntalivesh23]

I did read earlier that there were 260,000 redear stocked into Carlyle to supplement the bluegill since there size only averaged 6-8 inches maybe my friend was misinformed about the number and the reason why they were put there. And I may have gotten a little excited about hearing it lol. Either way I'm still excited about catching some nice redears in the near future